Citi on the Potomac

A crop of Obama administration picks spent time at Citi. | AP Photo

Lawmakers were critical as well.

“He presided over the bank that had the biggest problem and the division that had the biggest problem,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said at the time. “Normally, people who become secretary of Treasury — they’ve had a sterling record on Wall Street rather than a record of disaster.”

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Froman, who once served as Rubin’s chief of staff at the Treasury Department, also got an earful about his time at the bank. The Senate Finance Committee’s top Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, for example, took issue with Froman receiving millions of dollars in bonuses at the height of the financial crisis.

Hatch also chastised Obama for nominating Lew and Froman to top administration positions despite reports of their offshore investments – a move that the senator summed up as “hypocrisy” given the Obama campaign’s attacks against Mitt Romney’s foreign investments during the 2012 campaign.

Supporters of Fischer and Sheets are quick to point out that despite their ties to Citi, both have spent the bulk of their careers in government service — Sheets at the Federal Reserve and IMF, and Fischer at the IMF, World Bank and Bank of Israel.

While some outspoken critics of big banks, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have indicated they have questions for Fischer, both nominees are widely expected to be confirmed without facing serious opposition.

“I think people were very sensitive to this a couple of years ago,” said Simon Johnson, an economist and professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who is critical of Wall Street. “My sense is we’ve slipped back into a business-as-usual kind of mode.”

Executives from global banks have traditionally been among the picks for top administration positions, and industry observers say it’s no surprise that the Obama White House would follow that same tack.

Even those wary of Washington’s revolving door say it is not difficult to see why former Wall Street executives would be coveted by any administration for spots dealing with the economy and financial markets.

“These are really smart people generally, who really understand how the financial sector works and they understand how the economy works,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation. “The administration wants to maintain the confidence of Wall Street and they can do that by hiring people who’ve come from Wall Street.”

If Citi alumni dot the Obama administration’s top economic ranks, they are also joined by plenty of others who have limited or zero experience on Wall Street.

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has spent her career in academia and government; Fed Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin, who is expected to soon be confirmed as Lew’s deputy, spent years as a state regulator in Maryland; and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray served as Ohio’s attorney general.

But some reform advocates said Obama’s recent hires are disappointing, and worried the administration has relied too heavily on the Rubin circle to build its economic team.

Pulling too many top officials from the same pool, they argue, means less diversity of opinions among the people making the some of the most critical and influential decisions about the direction of the country.

“Yes, there is an issue, but I don’t think it’s about Citi, I think it’s about Robert Rubin,” said Cornelius Hurley, the director of the Center for Finance, Law & Policy at Boston University. “All of these apples have fallen from the Robert Rubin tree, who himself was both a Goldman and a Citi product. So the gene pool couldn’t be any smaller.”

Johnson also argued that Citi has had a close relationship with the government since Rubin joined the firm in 1999, and enjoyed a degree of protection during the crisis that was not available to any other firm “except maybe Goldman Sachs” — a charge government officials involved in the response to the crisis have strongly denied.

To some critics the issue is less Citi than to what degree so soon after the financial crisis having worked at a large bank should be a factor in evaluating candidates for top government jobs.

”There’s no reason why somebody that worked at Citi should be disqualified from any of these positions,” Barofsky added. “On the other hand, it’s totally fair for people who are reform minded and have seen the dangers of regulatory capture from hiring people from too big to fail institutions to closely scrutinize those candidates.”